The Redstone Missile

One Hermes test missile that did lead to a follow-on effort was the C1. General Electric envisioned it as a three-stage vehicle. How­ever, the company did not continue immediately with its original conception in 1946 because at that time it had insufficient data to design such a missile. In October 1950, Army Ordnance directed the firm to proceed with a feasibility study of Hermes C1 in con­junction with the Germans under von Braun. Meanwhile, in April 1948 Col. Holger Toftoy, heading the Rocket Branch in the Army Ordnance Department, recommended establishment of a rocket laboratory. The result was the reactivation of the World War II Red­stone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, announced by the chief of 26 ordnance on November 18, 1948.49 This became the site for most of Chapter 1 the development of the C1 missile as well as the reason for renam­ing it Redstone.

On October 28, 1949, the secretary of the army approved a move of the guided missile group—formerly known as the Ordnance Research

and Development Division Sub-Office (Rocket)—from Fort Bliss, Texas, to Redstone Arsenal. It became the Ordnance Guided Mis­sile Center. The army officially established the center on April 15, 1950. It took about six months for the people and equipment to be transferred. Those who moved included the German rocket group and some 800 other people, among them civil servants, GE employ­ees, and about 500 military personnel.50

Despite the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, the C1/ Redstone missile initially lacked significant funding. On July 10, 1950, Army Ordnance had told the center to study the possibility of developing a tactical missile with a 500-mile range and an ac­curacy that would place half of the warheads in a circle of 1,000 yards in radius (circular error probable, or CEP). Von Braun served as project engineer and put together a preliminary study, which he presented to the Department of Defense’s Research and Develop­ment Board in the fall of 1950. Army Ordnance did not send the center the missile’s initial funding in the amount of $2.5 million until May 1, 1951. Once development began in May, it continued for seven and a half years until the flight test of the last research – and-development vehicle. Proposed military characteristics for the missile changed over time. Using a modified North American Avia­tion (NAA) engine originally designed for the U. S. Air Force’s Na – vaho missile (canceled in 1958), the Redstone incorporated much American as well as German rocket technology. With other Ameri­can companies besides North American working on the missile, it became substantially different vehicle from the V-2.51

Following the usual high number of failures for early rockets dur­ing flight testing, the army deployed the 69-foot, 4-inch Redstone on June 18, 1958, and deactivated it in June 1964, when the faster and more mobile Pershing, also developed at Redstone Arsenal, re­placed it. Costing more per missile than the Corporal and Sergeant, the Redstone also had much higher performance in terms of range, thrust, and payload than its older cousins among army missiles (see table 1.1).52

More than just a missile, however, the Redstone also became the basis for the first stage of the first U. S. true launch vehicle. Known as the Jupiter C because of its use in testing Jupiter-missile compo­nents, the variant of the elongated Redstone used in this launch ve­hicle incorporated larger fuel and oxidizer tanks and a change from alcohol to hydyne (unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and diethyl­ene triamine) as the fuel to increase performance. For the upper stages, a combined Redstone Arsenal-JPL team employed six-inch – diameter scale models of the Sergeant missile already used as upper

stages in the Jupiter C tests. With three scaled-down-Sergeant upper stages, the Jupiter C became the Juno I launch vehicle. On Janu­ary 31, 1958, it lifted off from Cape Canaveral and placed the first U. S. satellite, the Explorer I, into orbit. Subsequently, somewhat modified Juno Is placed Explorer III and Explorer IV in orbit, with three other Explorer launches failing for various reasons.53

Explorer I was the United States’ rejoinder to the shocking launch by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, of Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite. Soon after Sputnik, the United States en­tered a competition with the Soviets to place a human being in orbit as part of an emerging space race between the two superpow­ers. Known as Project Mercury, the U. S. effort planned to use the air force’s Atlas missiles as launch vehicles for the orbiting cap­sules containing astronauts, but testing of the capsules in subor­bital flight employed modified Redstones as launchers. For these early launches, the Redstone was the only trustworthy booster in the American inventory. The military was still testing the Atlas as well as the Thor and Jupiter missiles. However, it required exten­sive modifications—some 800 in all—to make the Redstone safe for an astronaut in the Mercury capsule. Called the Mercury-Redstone, this version of the missile boosted Astronaut Alan Shepard into a successful suborbital flight on May 5, 1961, followed by Virgil I. Grissom on July 21 of the same year, concluding the involvement of Redstone in Project Mercury and its role as a launch vehicle.54